The Committee called on the government to do its best to prevent incidents and on local leaders to contribute to efforts to shed light on such incidents and create an atmosphere of tolerance.
Today's debate was requested by the Independent Democratic Serb Party (SDSS) in late November last year. It was held on the basis of a report compiled by the Ministry of the Interior, which describes 65 cases of attacks on ethnic Serbs, of which 26 have been solved.
Some participants in the debate said that the report cited cases of attacks on Serbs, their property and institutions, but failed to specify whether the incidents were ethnically motivated.
They therefore concluded that there was no definition of ethnically motivated incident, which made the police job more difficult.
The head of the OSCE Mission in Croatia, Jose Fuentes, said that ethnically motivated incidents hampered the return of refugees. Every three days a member of an ethnic minority is attacked in Croatia, he said.
Committee member Niko Rebic of the ruling Croatian Democratic Union (HDZ) said that there were much fewer incidents and that the ministry report was insufficient to give a realistic picture of the problem.
He added that the SDSS's request to discuss the topic was not well-intended, stating that he could not support "a proposal by people like Milorad Pupovac, who in the early 1990's accused Croatia of forcibly converting to Catholicism 10,000 Serb children".
The Committee also said in its conclusions that this problem should not be ignored, with Assistant Interior Minister Gojko Markovic appealing to members of the public to report such incidents.